The office on national statistics (ONS) have recently released a report that claims that a town’s proximity to London is one of the top 3 factors that affect a property’s value. The data presented by the ONS and recorded in 2019 found that towns within 200km of London...

Fantastic news coming out of NatWest Intermediary Solutions as they announce a significant improvement to their mortgage lending criteria – an increase to both the maximum term allowed and age allowed. What's new? Effective immediately, mortgages submitted via an...

Who are The West Brom? West Midlands based building society The West Brom has announced that they are vetoing their ban on shared ownership mortgages. The 173 year old building society, which was once known as a good new build shared ownership specialist, dropped out...

Mortgage lending juggernaut Santander have today announced that from the 11th of April they will be introducing new self-employed mortgage income requirements. We all know that when it comes to self-employed income, it is never a straightforward affair. Salaries,...

Both Halifax and Scottish Widows have announced today that there will be a dramatic shake up with their loan to income rules from Wednesday the 6th of April. Both lenders will be increasing their loan to income affordability from 4.49X to 4.75X income meaning that...

Over the last couple of days Santander has announced that it has increased its rates on most residential and buy to let products meaning that repayments will go up for thousands of people. Some of the rate changes are as follows…

If recent events have taught us anything it is that jobs, income, and cashflow aren’t always as straight forward and secure as we might think. Sometimes, no amount of planning can prepare you for unexpected events and now more than ever, it is difficult to know how to make sure that you are financially secure when the economy is so uncertain.

Since 2013 the government in conjunction with house builders has offered the Help to Buy scheme which was developed with the intention of helping struggling prospective home buyers to fund the purchase of a new build property. Initially the scheme was set to run until 2020 but was slightly restructured and extended until 2023. The scheme was an instant hit and people flocked in their thousands to make the most of a really incredible helping hand.

For many years, shared ownership was a rather specialist and quite uncommon means of purchase as most people understandably want to purchase an entire property rather than part of a property! However, as house prices have increased by 4.3% on average every year since 2011, it is becoming more and more difficult for people to both save enough deposit to buy a property and earn enough money to meet the mortgage lending required to purchase a whole property.

Over the last few years there has been a lot of talk around deposits or, more specifically, the struggles that new buyers go through to save a deposit. With banks and building societies restricting lending and becoming seemingly more demanding when it comes to customer cash contributions, new buyers have become disillusioned with the whole idea and feel penalised by banks, building societies and home sellers in favour of older, more experienced purchasers.

Official figures release by the bank of England shows that both gross and net borrowing figures dropped across the board in December 2021. With January 2022 figures still to come, what can we say about this?

2021 was the most first-time buyer saturated year in at least 10 years according to Halifax intermediaries coming off the back of a year of pandemic uncertainty.